What Should Aaron Do?

• How you would advise your students to respond in this situation?
  • "Today, one of your students, Aaron, asked you about a comment on his blog. Someone complimented him on his story but Aaron doesn’t recognize the name. You review the comment and the link provided, and it appears to be someone from Canada doing educational research. Aaron asks what he should do next."

Responses:

What Aaron did was correct, he asked his teacher what to do. Now it is the teacher who needs to decide what their next action regarding this unknown person should be. Here are some ideas the teacher could follow through with:

Ideas

1. Have a class discussion about how blogs can be seen by anyone in the world and that there might be times that someone reads your post and wants to send you a response. Could also show a video. CommonSense.org has an embedded video on Kid Safety online
2. Refer back to our "Rules of Blogging" or that Parent Letter that was sent home before the blogging project started- could be a rule not to respond to anyone outside our school we don't recognize
3. Aaron could reply with a simple thank you but not give out any further information.
4. Aaron can just appreciate the compliment without making a response.
5. Teacher look into the link provided, depending on topic, may comment (if possible/applicable) on said link (but not the student)
6. It might also be a good idea to discuss this with Aaron's parents and see how they would like for him to proceed. There may be some parents that would appreciate the sharing but it really is something at this age that they should be apart of.
7. Could change restrictions to monitor comments before it shows up on the blog. That way all inappropriate comments will not show up on the blog.